Slavery's
Global Comeback
Buying and selling people into forced labor is
bigger than ever. What "human trafficking" really
means.

By J.J. Gould

December 20, 2012 "Information
Clearing House"
- RANGOON, Burma -- Earlier this year, Ko Lin,
21 at the time, left his hometown of Bago, 50 miles
northeast of Rangoon, along with a friend to look
for work in Myawaddy, near the Thai border. The two
found jobs there as day laborers loading and
offloading goods, anything from rice to motorcycles,
that were being illicitly transported by truck in
and out of Thailand. After a month, Ko Lin had saved
up the equivalent of about US$150 and decided to
rejoin his family in Bago. Stopping first to pray at
a local pagoda, the two friends met a super-amiable
young woman who ended up pitching them an offer to
work in Thailand. Her uncle, she said, could arrange
a great job for them there.

Ko Lin was reluctant but bent to his friend's
enthusiasm. The uncle turned out to be a trafficker
who forced them to walk through the jungle for eight
days. They ended up in weeks of forced labor in
Chonburi, a city 60 miles east of Bangkok, after
which Ko Lin was knocked unconscious and woke up
separated from his friend on a fishing boat in the
Gulf of Thailand. For months, he then rarely if ever
had more than two hours of sleep a night, always on
a shared, cramped bed; he was given three meals only
on days when the captain felt he'd pulled in enough
fish to earn it; and when he was fed, it was always
dregs from a catch that couldn't be sold on the
market. His arms regularly became infected from the
extended exposure of minor wounds to sea water. If
he complained that he was feeling unwell, the crew
would beat him. He was injured multiple times by
heavy blocks and booms, once having to tend to a
head wound himself with a handful of wet rice. Three
months out, Ko Lin was rescued in a police raid.

There are
now twice as many people enslaved in the world
as there were in the 350 years of the
transatlantic slave trade.

Ma Moe, 34,
and her husband lived in a suburb about an hour
outside of Rangoon, poor enough that some days they
had nothing to eat. A friend offered her a job as a
domestic worker in China where, she was told, she
could make between $100 and $200 a month. Despite
her husband's objections, she decided to go. Near
the border, her friend told her the trip would be
getting rough and she should take some pills so she
wouldn't get carsick. The pills knocked her out
almost immediately. When she woke up, she was in a
small village in China; she still doesn't know
where. Kept with a few other women in a small house,
Ma Moe would be taken around to different villages
where she was offered up for purchase as a "wife."
After a failed escape attempt, when she was beaten
by local police, a man from northern China bought
her. Given the anxious month-and-a-half she'd now
spent as a Burmese commodity in China, she could
hardly eat from the stress and was emaciated.
Concerned, wanting a child, the man who bought her
had her blood tested; the results showed she's
HIV-positive; and he ended up leaving her at the bus
station. With no hope of being able to get back to
Burma, she prayed to die there. But a young
newspaper seller, after fending off an attempt by
another apparent trafficker to get Ma Moe to go with
him, called a Chinese police hotline for trafficking
victims. The police coordinated Ma Moe's transfer to
a Burmese anti-trafficking task force, and they
ultimately took her home.

There's a plain-language word for the horror stories
that Ko Lin and Ma Moe have survived, as
anachronistic as it might sound: slavery.
Contemporary slavery is real, and it's terribly
common -- here in Burma, across Southeast Asia, and
around the world.

The leading demographic accounts of contemporary
slavery project a global slave population of between
20 million and 30 million people. Most of these
people are in sedentary forms of slavery, such as
hereditary collateral-debt bondage. But about 20
percent have been unwittingly trafficked though the
promise of opportunity by predators through varying
combinations of deception and coercion, very mobile,
very dynamic, leveraging communications and
logistics in the same basic way modern businesses do
generally. After the earthquake of 2010 devastated
Haiti,
Hispaniola was quickly overrun with
opportunistic traffickers targeting children to sell
into domestic slavery or brothels. Others are
children literally sold by parents or relatives in
order to pay off debt or to lessen their economic
burden. The highest ratios of slaves worldwide are
from South and Southeast Asia, along with China,
Russia, Albania, Belarus, and Romania. There is a
significant slave presence across North Africa and
the Middle East, including
Lebanon. There is also a
major slave trade in Africa. Descent-based
slavery persists in Mauritania, where children of
slaves are passed on to their slave-holders'
children. And the
North Korean gulag system, which holds 200,000
people, is essentially a constellation of
slave-labor camps.

As pervasive as contemporary slavery is, it hasn't
come clearly into focus as a global issue until
relatively recently. There are a couple of big
reasons why -- one having to do with the scale of
the problem, the other with the idea of slavery
itself.

The Scale

The International Labor Organization (ILO)
estimates the number of slaves in the world today at
around 21 million. Kevin Bales, of
Free the
Slaves -- the U.S. affiliate of the world's
oldest human-rights organization, the U.K.-based
Anti-Slavery International -- (and the author of
Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global
Economy) puts it at 27 million. Siddharth
Kara of Harvard's
Carr Center for Human Rights Policy says more
than 29 million.

That range represents a tightening consensus. In the
1990s, some accounts had the world's slave
population as high as 100 million; others had it as
low as 2 million. "It was nuts," says Bales. "I
traced all these numbers back. The 100-million
number, I finally found this guy in India who'd said
it at at UN conference. I asked him, 'How did you
get that?' And he said, 'I don't know, it was just a
guess.' So nobody had the number."

Bales's 27 million -- which as a statistician he
considers a "conservative estimate" -- is derived
from secondary-source analysis. "It's still not
great," he says, "in the sense that it's not based
on random-sample surveys at the grass-roots level.
We're doing that now, though, building much sounder
numbers, and they're still coming out in the same
range. ... So we're getting closer."

In which case, assuming even the rough accuracy of
27 million, there are likely more slaves in the
world today than there have been at any other time
in human history. For some quick perspective on that
point: Over the entire 350 years of the
transatlantic slave trade, 13.5 million people were
taken out of Africa, meaning there are twice as many
enslaved right now as there had been in that whole
350-year span.

The Idea

Some of what's obscured contemporary slavery, then,
has been mathematical; but some has been conceptual:
In the West, and particularly in the United States,
slavery has long settled in the public imagination
as being categorically a thing of the past.

One consequence of this is that when people apply
the idea of slavery to current events, they tend to
think of it as an analogy. That is, they tend to use
the word to dramatize conditions that may be
exploitive -- e.g., terrible wages or toxic working
environments -- but that we'd never on their own
call "slavery" if the kind of forced labor we used
to call "slavery" still existed. "In 1994, when I
was in the United Nations Working Group on
Contemporary Forms of Slavery," Bales recalls, "a
group came in and said they wanted the UN to declare
incest a form of slavery. And we were like, incest
is incest; you don't have to call it slavery."

But there's a reverse consequence to seeing slavery
as a thing of the past, too: It can mean having a
harder time recognizing slavery when it's right in
front of us.

A slave in Kathmandu, Nepal, stacks
18 bricks at a time, each weighing four pounds,
carrying them to nearby trucks for 18 hours a day. (Lisa
Kristine)

Right after the end of the Cold War, people in
Western cities -- in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam,
London, New York -- started noticing something
pronounced about migration patterns out of the
just-collapsed Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc: The
"immigrants" were disproportionately young women and
girls. It took no one long to understand that they
were prostitutes, and it took few much longer to get
that they weren't operating freely; criminals were
trafficking them out of Eurasia effectively as
black-market goods, like opium or Kalashnikovs.

The dominant rhetoric that the coalition of
Christian conservatives and anti-prostitution
feminists who took the lead on this issue used at
the time wasn't "slavery" but "trafficking for
sexual exploitation." Around the same time, a
movement developed against sweatshop labor that
ended up focusing not broadly on the issue of forced
labor but narrowly on the conditions of the
sweatshops themselves, sometimes even just on safety
issues within them.

Luis CdeBaca, the U.S. ambassador at large to
monitor and combat trafficking in persons, sees both
of these frameworks as inhibiting and, intentionally
or not, ways to feel too comfortable about
addressing the issues in question. "If we say the
problem with domestic servants is that they're not
covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, and so
let's just go out and make sure they get covered by
labor laws around the world, we get to ignore, for
example, the fact that domestic servants are being
locked in and raped. It's not a wage issue; it's a
crime issue. If we look at prostitution and we
devolve back to the old debates about whether
prostitution should be legal and regulated, should
it be illegal and criminalized, we won't say, '...
hey, why doesn't the 13th Amendment apply to a woman
in prostitution just as much as to a woman on a
farm?' Then we end up missing the reality of modern
slavery."

Pattern Recognition

CdeBaca thinks we've been using euphemisms about
slavery in our recent history scarcely less
euphemistic than were "servant" or "peculiar
institution" before the U.S. Civil War, noting
current preferences for "gender-based violence" or
"rape as a weapon of war" to describe what goes on
in eastern Congo. "If rape becomes the more
comfortable word than slavery," CdeBaca says, "you
know slavery is a highly emotive term."

But if the president of the United States has
nevertheless embraced the term "slavery," as Barack
Obama has now done with
his speech at the Clinton Global Institute in
September, you know it's also an emotive term whose
time has come -- or come again. The State
Department, meanwhile, now answers the question "What
is modern slavery?" by implying, virtually to
the point of stating, that it now considers
"slavery" the umbrella term for crimes of
"trafficking":

Over the past 15 years,
"trafficking in persons" and "human trafficking"
have been used as umbrella terms for activities
involved when someone obtains or holds a person
in compelled service.

The United States government considers
trafficking in persons to include all of the
criminal conduct involved in forced labor and
sex trafficking, essentially the conduct
involved in reducing or holding someone in
compelled service. Under the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act as amended (TVPA) and consistent
with the United Nations Protocol to Prevent,
Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons,
Especially Women and Children (Palermo
Protocol), individuals may be trafficking
victims regardless of whether they once
consented, participated in a crime as a direct
result of being trafficked, were transported
into the exploitative situation, or were simply
born into a state of servitude. Despite a term that seems to
connote movement, at the heart of the phenomenon
of trafficking in persons are the many forms of
enslavement, not the activities involved in
international transportation.

(Emph. added)

CdeBaca understands the
Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the
Palermo Protocol that State mentions here, both
dating from 2000, to be crucial preconditions for
the change in social conceptions about human
trafficking and forced labor that have followed.
Usually the dynamic is the other way around, CdeBaca
says: A social movement grows and, if it's
successful, after 10 years or so, Congress passes
legislation or the UN (or some other international
body) passes a resolution. With contemporary
slavery, more than a decade of governmental and
trans-governmental initiatives have seeded the
social conversation, which has in turn taken the
lead in articulating the emerging consensus around
the language of contemporary slavery.

CdeBaca thinks this consensus is hugely
consequential, not just domestically in the U.S. --
where Obama has now not only embraced this language
but issued an
executive order to remove human trafficking and
forced labor from federal contracting -- but
globally. "The fact that we're able to come into a
place like Burma, which has come so far so fast just
in the last 10 or 12 months, with this unified
message is wonderful," he says, "because the
government here isn't going to have to unlearn those
differences. When we talked to the government [on
Friday], they were talking about forced labor and
forced prostitution as though they're the same
concept. We didn't have to talk through 'here's why
you need to care about forced labor as much as you
care about forced prostitution,' or 'here's why the
girls in the brothels matter.' They got it. And I
think it's because they come into this at this
moment, now."

The New Abolitionism

It's to the not-modest credit of modern civilization
that the awareness of slavery has always given rise
to anti-slavery movements. Abolitionism today may be
more complex than what went before it only because
it has to be. Contemporary slavery is, as Ethan
Kapstein wrote in Foreign Affairs back in 2006, "a
product of the same political, technological, and
economic forces that have fueled globalization" --
or as Andrew Forrest, the chairman of Fortescue
Metals Group and founder of the anti-slavery group
Walk Free,
has it, "Slavery is the dark side of globalization."

In essence, organizations like Walk Free, or the
Global Business Coalition Against Trafficking (gBCAT),
want harness the good, or at least potentially good,
aspects of globalization to eliminate its most evil
aspect. Forrest believes that it now makes maximum
sense for big global businesses to integrate their
risk-management strategies with their
corporate-social-responsibility strategies and their
procurement strategies, cleaning their supply chains
once and for all of any involvement with forced
labor. Forrest believes in the constructive power of
potential shame, too, with his current campaign to
recruit major businesses around the world to sign on
to Walk Free's "zero tolerance for slavery pledge."

Projects
like this won't necessarily be easy; in fact, their
success will necessarily be a tough question. There
are certainly precedents for it: Nike may be one of
the most slave-free garment manufacturers in the
world today, because it got hammered for its labor
practices in the 1990s by a very successful campaign
against it as a brand -- brand equity being a very
important, very bottom-line issue for a company like
Nike. But what if we're looking instead at a mining
company that needs to procure concrete for railway
tracks to get its materials out, and the best deal
on concrete is made by slave labor in Abu Dhabi by
some nameless supplier? There's no brand equity at
stake there. Mineral extraction is a similarly
faceless industry. We all know who makes our cell
phones; few of us know who makes the tantalum and
coltan that go into them. That doesn't have to be
note of cynicism, but it does get at the complexity
of the challenge in leveraging global business's
better angels against its worst instincts.

There will meanwhile be new opportunities for
political will against slavery, particularly now
that Obama has used the word -- new legislative
efforts, new instruments of international
cooperation -- and new opportunities to build
important capacities, with law enforcement, with
victim care and rehabilitation, and so on.

And then there will be social-awareness campaigns --
which may represent the one strand of the
contemporary anti-slavery movement skeptical
observers are more inclined to be cynical about than
they are about the leadership of global business on
the issue. If you're tempted to think that way,
consider before anything else that here in Rangoon,
it's not only perfectly reasonable but a vital
public-service announcement to say, "Kids, this is
how you recognize it if someone's trying to trick
you into slavery, and this is what you do about it
...." When I asked Ma Moe, who'd been sold into
slavery by a friend, what was the most important
thing she wanted people to understand about her
experience, she lit up emotionally in a way she
hadn't up to then, insisting emphatically on how
crucial it is that people in Burma -- especially
young people -- get the coaching they need to
insulate themselves and their families from the risk
of being trafficked, particularly given how
sophisticated traffickers are at profiling victims
and preying on trust.

Neither is any of this the hard part compared with
the complex task of modulating or outright changing
kinds of social norms that heighten the risk of
capture by traffickers, particularly in contexts
governed by a
caste system or other forms of entrenched social
hierarchy. Which aren't uncommon across South and
Southeast Asia, and which can create barriers to
human empathy every bit as powerful as what morally
and psychologically enabled the open slave trade of
the 16th-19th centuries.

Precedents

There are historical reasons why social awareness of
slavery could be more effective on the global level
than we might first be inclined to think.

"Stowage of the British Slave Ship
'Brookes' Under the Regulated Slave Trade, Act of
1788" (Thomas Clarkson)

As Bales likes
to remember, there have been three major
anti-slavery movements in the modern era prior to
the nascent contemporary one.
The first was started in 1787 by Anti-Slavery
International -- or as it was called at the time,
the Society for Effecting the Termination of the
Slave Trade -- in London. Twenty years later, the
slave trade in the British Empire was finished. This
worked completely through social mobilization; in
fact, it was one of the first major social movements
in the West. The Society inundated parliament with
huge petitions against slavery -- 517 altogether. It
passed around anti-slavery cameos that fashionable
women wore in bracelets and pins. And it
disseminated Thomas Clarkson's drawing of the
Liverpool-based slave ship Brookes, showing
the horrible reality that slaves were forced to
cross the Atlantic packed in like sardines, lying in
their own excrement and vomit, for months. This
picture was extremely shocking -- and effective.

The second anti-slavery movement was marked by some
of the most decisive moral leadership in U.S.
history, but it was also thwarted by a virtually
total social division between the North and the
South, with virtually total Southern intransigence,
and
culminated an enormous war that resulted in
upward of
three-quarters of a million deaths and new
troubles for the United States' former slaves that
have cast a long shadow since.

Hierarchical societies still create empathy
barriers as powerful as what enabled the open
slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries.

The third movement
is less well known but offers a precedent for
contemporary abolitionism that may be in some ways
as compelling as the first. This was the global
movement, which included luminaries like
Mark Twain and
Sarah Bernhardt, against the enslavement of
between 5 and 10 million people in the Congo as the
personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. The
purpose of this enslavement was to feed new
technologies, particularly pneumatic rubber tires.
But the breakthrough for this movement was also
thanks to new technologies: portable cameras that
enabled abolitionists to do
magic-lantern shows in big theaters across
Europe and America -- a kind of documentary film
before there were documentary films -- detailing the
destitution in the Congo and the routine physical
mutilation of slaves who failed to meet their
"rubber quotas," which truly freaked viewers out and
helped mobilize the public broadly. After this
anti-slavery campaign captured the photos it
captured and showed them, Leopold, who had
completely denied everything until then -- and he
could, because there was no way to prove what he was
doing -- gave up, ended the enslavement, and, in
1908, relinquished the Congo to the Belgian
government.

Let's see what the fourth one does. The most
optimistic view says that as massive as slavery is
today, it's also on the edge of its own extinction,
needing only the right push. If the global slave
population is 27 million, it's still 27 million out
of a total of 7 billion, making it -- and here's the
paradox -- the smallest fraction of the global
population to be enslaved ever. If slavery generates
between $30 billion and $45 billion a year to the
global economy, it's a big industry, but it also
amounts to the smallest ratio of the global economy
ever represented by slave labor and slave output.
While slavery has grown in absolute terms, it's
shrunk in relative terms, and so, the theory goes,
it's increasingly vulnerable.

A possibly less optimistic but still hopeful
variation on this theme -- well clear of the most
pessimistic view, at any rate, which would be that
slavery is simply endemic to global capitalism -- is
that slavery isn't just growing more slowly than the
rest of the world is; it's also increasingly toxic
to the rest of the world; and it's increasingly
toxic in ways that the rest of the world will be
forced to defend itself against. The same interests
responsible for human trafficking and forced labor
are, after all, also responsible for fostering other
types of crime, as well as the kinds of corruption
that slave-labor operations need for survival. If
developed countries let slavery go unchecked, it
will threaten to corrode the bilateral and
multilateral agreements, and the international rule
of law, that the whole global economy depends on. If
developing countries don't check it, it may or may
not mean slower short-term growth, but it definitely
complicate long-term growth growth, or stunt it
altogether, as outside investors bring more scrutiny
and demand more transparency. In the meantime, the
more visible an issue slavery becomes globally, the
less inclined I'd be to forget some of the social
uses mobile technology and social media been put to
around the world in the last two years -- or to
ignore the analogies between these uses and some of
the tactics of the first and third modern
anti-slavery movements.

The relationship between a country's tacit
willingness to abide slavery and that country's risk
of being left behind by the currents of global
civilization isn't one that Burmese officials are
necessarily inclined to discuss candidly. When I
asked Brigadier General Kin Maung Si, the chief of
police and head of the ministry of home affairs's
human-trafficking office, about his government's
emerging commitment to eliminating forced labor, he
spoke only of poor economic conditions as a cause of
slavery, not of slavery as a cause of economic
stagnation. But it's a relationship that his
government's new commitments acknowledge implicitly.

It's also a relationship that the leading exponents
of the second modern anti-slavery movement were
emphatic about and staked their own political
reasoning on. As The Atlantic's first editor,
James Russell Lowell,
wrote in the magazine's endorsement of Abraham
Lincoln for president in 1860:

The
inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate
in a few hands the soil, the capital, and the
power of the countries where it exists, to
reduce the non-slaveholding class to a
continually lower and lower level of property,
intelligence, and enterprise. ... We do not, of
course, mean to say that slaveholding states may
not and do not produce fine men; but they fail,
by the inherent vice of their constitution and
its attendant consequences, to create
enlightened, powerful, and advancing communities
of men, which is the true object of all
political organization.

J.J. Gould is deputy editor
of TheAtlantic.com. He has written for The
Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, The
Moscow Times, and The European Journal of
Political Theory

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